Discover the plugins, integrations, and add-ons that take your smart home from functional to phenomenal.
🍄 Mushroom Cards – Stylish Simplicity
If you’re still using the default Lovelace cards, you’re missing out. Mushroom Cards are a beautifully designed set of UI elements that bring a modern, consistent look to your dashboards. With clean icons, dynamic theming, and endless customization, Mushroom Cards are the aesthetic backbone of a smart home that looks as good as it works.
🧠 Frigate – Smart, Local Object Detection
Security cameras are only smart if they know what they’re seeing. Frigate uses local AI (with hardware acceleration) to detect people, cars, pets, and more—without sending anything to the cloud. Integrate it with Home Assistant to trigger automations only when relevant motion is detected. Want a light to come on when a person enters the driveway, not when a tree sways? Frigate’s your hero.
🌐 AdGuard Home – Built-in Privacy Firewall
Forget annoying ads, trackers, and telemetry from your devices. AdGuard Home, installable via Home Assistant’s Add-on Store, gives you whole-network ad blocking and DNS filtering. You’ll be amazed at the performance gains and peace of mind that come from keeping your smart home truly private.
☀️ Adaptive Lighting – Light That Thinks for You
Sunrise, sunset, circadian rhythms—it’s all baked in. Adaptive Lighting dynamically adjusts the color temperature and brightness of your smart lights throughout the day. Set it once, and your lighting becomes not just smart, but truly human-centric. Ideal for comfort, focus, and better sleep.
🎛️ Custom:Entity Card – Total Control in a Tiny Space
This card does everything the standard cards won’t. Want to color-code an icon based on state? Display multiple attributes with custom formatting? Use templating inside a card? The custom:entity card (via HACS) is the Swiss army knife of dashboard design—especially for users who want power and precision.
🔁 Scheduler Component – Better Than Automations
Ever wished you could just set something to happen on certain days and times—like a thermostat or light—without writing YAML? The Scheduler Component gives you a visual scheduler panel that feels like a classic timer interface. Perfect for user-friendly control without sacrificing power.
📲 Browser Mod – Deep Device Awareness
Home Assistant doesn’t normally know what device you’re viewing it on. Browser Mod changes that. It allows for per-device dashboards, TTS directly to specific tablets, and screen wake/sleep commands. If you’re running a tablet dashboard in every room, this is the glue that makes it all feel personal.
🌍 Mini Media Player – Sleek Audio Control
Tired of clunky media player cards? Mini Media Player gives you elegant, compact controls with album art, volume sliders, group management, and custom icons. Whether you’re blasting Spotify or controlling your whole-home audio setup, this card looks great and feels intuitive.
🧾 Auto-Entities – Dynamic Dashboards Done Right
Managing dashboards manually gets tedious fast. Auto-Entities builds card content dynamically, based on filters. Want a card that shows only open windows, or devices currently charging? Set the filter once, and the list updates itself in real time. It’s magic for complex setups.
📦 File Editor + Studio Code Server – Local Dev Powerhouse
For advanced users, these add-ons turn your Home Assistant into a web-based IDE. Whether you’re editing YAML, creating templates, or debugging automations, having full access to your config folder with syntax highlighting and tab-completion is an absolute game changer.
Want to go even deeper into the rabbit hole?
Stay tuned for our upcoming guide on next-level automations, voice control beyond the cloud, and seamless dashboard theming.